Speeches by Smith.

“I just wanted to prompt my right hon. Friend to pursue one other matter, which is quite important. I was looking at the list of the judges who sat on the ICJ panel. It is quite interesting. Apart from there being a Russian who was fully supportive of the invasion of Ukraine, it turns out that Vice-President Xue, who wr…”

“I am loath to return to a Department that I ran for six years, but I thought it would be useful at this point. After covid, the whole Department’s expenditure and costs ballooned, which was obviously a feature of the nature of the breakdown in terms of employment and so on. It is therefore one of the Departments that t…”

“It is very good to see you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I will obey your strictures and try to keep this brief. I want to focus on a very narrow aspect of special educational needs. I congratulate the hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Jenny Riddell-Carpenter) on securing this debate. As we can see, many Members have issues w…”

“I welcome the Prime Minister’s announcement. I personally think it is a start, not a finish—I think we will find that we have to raise defence spending further—but I welcome it none the less, and on behalf of all of this House and my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch), I will support it. T…”

“Yes, you have my support.”

“No, because I misheard you—I thought you were calling me out. But the view here is much better, too.”

“Yes is the answer, although obviously I would be astonished if it were not picked. The timing is not as important as the subject.”

“Whatever the question about energy is, China is not the answer. First, we know the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero have raised objections about the Treasury’s push to bring Mingyang Smart Energy into the circuit to bid for this. Secondly, China is determined to involve slave labo…”

“I am astonished by the coroner’s findings. He was not asked to contemplate the question about why—getting inside the head of a soldier who is worried about whether they are going to be shot dead is very difficult. I served in Northern Ireland and some of the decisions that we had to take were instantaneous. There was n…”

“I came back from Ukraine a week and a half ago. I was very close to the front and talked to many of the military commanders there, and they made it very clear to me that they were desperately short of artillery pieces, 155 mm, and, most importantly, munitions—they could hardly respond to the Russians. As I understand i…”

“7. What his planned timetable is for the annual provision of £3 billion of military support to Ukraine.”

“I am not quite sure how the logic works on that. We introduced a £2 limit in the betting shops, but for some reason we have introduced a higher limit where we think the harms are greatest. Which one is wrong?”

“Mr Turner, it is, as ever, a pleasure to see you in one of these debates, even if you are not speaking on the subject. It is great to have you in the Chair. I congratulate the hon. Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) on obtaining this debate. It is great to see so many Government Members taking part; there have been …”

“We have deliberately not called for a substantive motion. We do not have a problem, in policy terms, with the Government, because, as we know, the UK has almost uniquely had no issue between parties on all of this—we have been 100% behind each other—so I do not think it is for us to lecture them. The purpose of the deb…”

“We will take anything we can get—as long as possible, and as soon as possible.”

“Can I make one other point that has occurred to me? While we were there, we discovered all sorts of stuff about what is going on behind the scenes that very rarely gets reported. For example, there are nearly 50,000 Ukrainian soldiers right now needing prostheses. You cannot believe the scale of the tragedy that is goi…”

“I have not officially, because I thought it was right that I came here first. Now that you have told me what you have just told me, I would be very happy to go and see the Leader of the House—I know her very well—and simply say, “Could you think about it?” But I would hope that the Committee might want to involve itsel…”

“Thank you very much indeed. Much of this is self-explanatory, but two points are relevant here. One is that the invasion took place on 24 February three years ago. We are not going to be able to hit that date, but as close to that date as possible is what we are after. The intriguing thing about this is that it took me…”

“Yes, absolutely. I fully understand the restrictions and so on, but I hope that the Government might be minded to make a bit of time. If they don’t, as I say, the earliest slot in March would be a fall-back.”

“It is 24 February, yes.”